Gaylord's 'helicopter grandma' takes off

July 16, 2001|By Hillary Dickerson

Following the lead set by her husband, Bryan, more than 25 years earlier when he earned his pilot's license and started flying fixed-wing aircraft, Carol decided to go for her helicopter license five years ago. "Before I got too old," she joked, saying that the time had come.

Why a helicopter?

Carol said she tried flying fixed-wing once and just wasn't comfortable with the feel. When Bryan received his instrument ranking and took to helicopters, Carol's interest piqued. "I thought, 'This could be fun.'"

But getting a license took time and dedication. Carol explained the process includes ground school, flight with an instructor and a certain number of solo hours in a Robinson R-22. The tedious 60 hours of training ended with a written test and a check flight.

Carol was ready to fly. And that's exactly what she's been doing ever since.

The Kaspers, who own Kasper Industries in Gaylord, use their Boeing MD-600 for some business, but mostly for recreation when they travel - usually just the two of them - to their cabin in Canada, or perhaps just to visit friends in Johannesburg.

Advertisement

For easy access, the Kaspers are lucky enough to have their helicopter landing pad and hangar just down the driveway from their house. In fact, Carol noted, when the couple moved to Gaylord from Flushing about two years ago, the building process began first with the hangar for storage. Then came the house.

The pad and hangar are certainly nice to have, but when landing, it still takes some pretty fancy maneuvering to park the helicopter on the cart that sits on the pad. Once on the cart, the helicopter can be pushed or pulled into the hangar for protection from the weather.

While in the air, it really is quite complicated to maneuver the helicopter, doing four or five different things at once, Carol said.

"It's easy for backhoe operators to do because they're used to it," she smiled. "Once you learn to hover, you pretty much have it licked, but to hold it still in the air is a trick."

The black helicopter sitting on the pad at the Kaspers' home is fairly unique and considerably safer and quieter because it doesn't have a tail rotor. Pilots of helicopters that do have the tailpiece have to be extremely careful and mindful of where they position themselves, because if the rotor hits a tree or brush, down goes the helicopter.

Carol explained since helicopters don't fly too far off the ground - only 500 or 600 feet, that affords the pilot and any passengers a close-up view from the air of things other people normally wouldn't see from a car or an airplane.

"It's amazing to see things from the air," Carol said, citing the tundra in northern Manitoba as being of particular interest when she or Bryan slows the helicopter down to view the wildlife. "The moose, the caribou - in places where people normally can't get to hunt them - they get pretty big."

In the years of flying Carol and Bryan have had, there was only one serious scare, and that wasn't with the helicopter. "We had an emergency landing with the airplane in the Bahamas once when the oil line broke," Carol said. She noted they always face the possibility of running into bad weather, but the real dangers come with freezing rain or thunderstorms. Since helicopter pilots rely on their visibility, if fog presents itself, they land, returning to the air when the fog lifts.

Carol plans to keep flying, and although Mitchell and his brother and cousins have a few years to decide if they want to follow in their grandma's footsteps, she'll be a willing teacher to them if they so choose. Then, perhaps, she'll dress in a T-shirt proclaiming "My grandsons fly helicopters," knowing full well that she contributed to their interest.